The X.Org Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC)

For the last several years, X.Org was a participating mentoring organization in Google's most excellent Summer of Code (GSoC) program. This program provides approximately US$5000 to students to spend their summer developing code for an open source project. Each student proposes a project and is matched with an organization mentor who guides and evaluates the work. GSoC was great for X.Org; we saw more than a dozen students through it, and some of these students went on to be extremely active contributors to X.Org.

However, for whatever reason some students with good project proposals who would like to participate in GSoC have been unable to do so. Typically, this was because Google funded fewer high-quality GSoC proposals than we had available in a given year, or because the rigid timing of GSoC was entirely incompatible with a student's calendar.

Rather than lose out on getting students working on X, the X.Org Foundation Board voted in 2008 to initiate a program known as the X.Org Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC) program. The basic terms and conditions of this program are quite similar to Google's GSoC. The key differences are that (1) an EVoC mentorship can be initiated at any time during the calendar year, and (2) the Board can fund as many of these mentorships as it sees fit. We will also consider a broader range of proposals than GSoC: technical documentation is a specific area of interest for us.

A proposal will typically be for a period of three to four months of contiguous nearly-full-time work, and will be funded at the US$5000-$6000 level, with an initial payment and further payments upon completion of project milestones. The proposal should include a detailed proposed scope of work and schedule; see the X.Org GSoC Application page for more information about writing successful proposals. Proposals must acquire a lead mentor from the X.Org technical community in order to be accepted; if the student can help identify this person early, that will increase their chance of success.

Non-students may also participate in EVoC. Application and participation for non-students is the same as for students, with one exception: non-students will not be paid. The X.Org Foundation believes that paying non-students to help develop X leads to a variety of problems, not least of which is complicating the non-profit status of the Foundation. For EVoC purposes, a student is someone who is a half-time or more college or university student during, immediately before or immediately after their EVoC period. Secondary school students 18 years of age or older are also eligible; sadly, it is legally complicated to pay younger students.

Students are welcome to either come up with an idea on their own or work up a proposal for an idea suggested by someone else. Lists of ideas that existing developers have come up with can be found at ToDo and Ideas.

Hanging out on the irc channels (listed below) and talking with people there is an excellent way to flush out ideas and/or possible mentors.

Students need to have at least a basic understanding of the following:

mailing lists

irc (graphics developers use irc.freenode.net #xorg-devel,#xorg, #dri-devel, #nouveau and #wayland to name a few.)

gcc

git

Be comfortable using a linux shell and command line

At the current time, X.Org Foundation member Matt Dew marcoz AT osource DOT org is the contact person for X.Org EVoC. All inquiries should be emailed to him, with a cc to board AT foundation DOT x DOT org.